...they choose to be completely and utterly nonchalant about this and instead panic every time their weather takes a turn for the slightly different.
I suppose this comes from living on a continent that got all that messy geological stuff out of its system a long time ago. We in New Zealand have volcanos and earthquakes to contend with on a daily basis. When I was a kid I walked to school barefoot through molten lava and chased by an angry landslide, so that kind of stuff is run of the mill. Over here though the landscape does nothing interesting at all, unless you count spontaneously combusting into statewide infernos or disappearing under flash floods... and really, that hardly counts.
So yesterday when most of Queensland and New South Wales was suddenly blanketed under a rather fetching red dust storm, my reaction was to take photos and make 'ooh' and 'aah' noises.
Meanwhile the rest of the country was CONSUMED BY TERROR. See for yourself the rest of the household, literally paralyzed with horror as the red glow shines with malevolent intent from without:
That shit was all over the news, documentaries, talkshows, radio, the lot. You'd think there was some kind of dust fueled apocalypse going on across this fair country, as everyone freaked the hell out. They dragged out old people who professed that this was the worst dust storm in 60 years. They showed complicated wind direction graphs with exciting looking directional arrows and complicated looking meteorological information. In its usual schizophrenic manner the media tried to both calmly inform and scare the living crap out of the general audience at the same time, and during this crisis I was the calm in the storm, and the next day I knew what to do:
